A story of a successful lens

This is the story of a lens that gets most traffic. Today it gets, as you can see, about a hundred visitors a day. That’s enough for a permanent spot in the squidoo top 2000, and with people voting on it regularly it’s enough for a regular spot in the top 100 as well. It is one of my oldest lenses.

As you can see it had 30 visitors a day nine months after it was made. That must be just about when I became aware of the potential of squidoo as a traffic puller for my site. To be fair, this is a keyword that hasn’t been popular for more than a few years. I think I started the lens roughly when people were starting to search for this term in google a lot (which is a few years AFTER I had started making content targeted at that niche, just because I loved it).

Why am I showing this graph? Well, my main point is that traffic growth is generally slow. It is also not a linear thing. As you can see there are jumps and starts to the traffic this lens got. There was roughly linear growth till July last year. Then a few months of ‘only’ visitors a day again. Then suddenly in September traffic went up a LOT. This is just about when I became Giant Squid, and also when I started my blog and went on twitter. I guess all that extra promotion helped my lens a lot. But that growth wasn’t permanent. In fact traffic slowly got less over the next few months. The low point being again a ‘mere’ 30 visitors a day. But as you can see in the last 2 months traffic has been going up again, though with a lot of spikes.

The start of the latest growth in traffic can be dated pretty directly to the links I got off being a member of the Giant Squid top 100 club. Those links didn’t come from just becoming a member of the club, but from taking advantage of the promotional opportunities all Giant Squids have. I’m talking about that lovely blog: the Giant Squid Community showcase.

I’ve not capitlized on any of the opportunities given to Giant Squids I guess. (don’t know much about the community showcase) However, I know that getting links via higher traffic blogs/sites can do A GREAT DEAL. I don’t know how but several months ago I had a lens mentioned by BDKZ and it shot right up, just as another one of my lenses did when rms featured it on Cabaret Squidoo.

Well for giants the giant squid community showcase is great. They have a lens (just google it) where you can submit your best lenses – then people vote for them – and the one that gets most votes will be featured on the blog. I don’t know why people don’t add their lenses there more often. I guess I’m just more link obsessed than most.